Blood Music
Greg Bear · 1985
A biologist injects himself with intelligent lymphocytes. The cells evolve into a civilization, then into something beyond civilization. Bear's 1985 hard-SF novel about biological transcendence anticipated the Singularity before the term existed. It remains viscerally terrifying.
The case against
Bear expanded a tight, terrifying novelette into a novel, and the seams are where the terror leaks out. Once the noocytes absorb North America, characters dissolve into abstraction and the physics goes mystical (observers altering reality through sheer numbers). Vergil Ulam is a plot device with a job title. The first hundred pages are the book.
Science Fiction & Fantasy · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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